PupCuff
Member
It's fairly easy to say that safety is an opportunity for some compromise with the aim of reducing costs; the more difficult challenge is identifying what we actually mean by 'safety'.
Do we mean relaxing engineering standards for new rail vehicles (which may also have the effect of increasing maintenance requirements due to a poor quality product)?
Do we look at technical safety systems such as AWS, TPWS, etc (which tend to be good value for money when we stack the costs up against the benefits)?
Do we repeal rail safety legislation and just rely on general H&S law (rail specific safety legislation has the benefit of helping all rail businesses 'sing from the same hymn sheet')?
Do we cut safety management activity, such as accident investigations, audits, incident trend analysis, etc (which tend to nip small issues in the bud before they become bigger ones)?
Do we cut numbers of staff undertaking frontline roles with a safety responsibility, eg having trains self dispatch (those staff also provide value in security checks, customer service, and are gaining good experience to potentially move into management roles in due course)?
Do we change processes so that they can be 'less safe' to be approved (processes which tend to be put in place for a reason to reduce risk and save the cost of personal injury claims etc)?
I think there is plenty of scope to make things more efficient on the railway; from my point of view I would suggest that:
Do we mean relaxing engineering standards for new rail vehicles (which may also have the effect of increasing maintenance requirements due to a poor quality product)?
Do we look at technical safety systems such as AWS, TPWS, etc (which tend to be good value for money when we stack the costs up against the benefits)?
Do we repeal rail safety legislation and just rely on general H&S law (rail specific safety legislation has the benefit of helping all rail businesses 'sing from the same hymn sheet')?
Do we cut safety management activity, such as accident investigations, audits, incident trend analysis, etc (which tend to nip small issues in the bud before they become bigger ones)?
Do we cut numbers of staff undertaking frontline roles with a safety responsibility, eg having trains self dispatch (those staff also provide value in security checks, customer service, and are gaining good experience to potentially move into management roles in due course)?
Do we change processes so that they can be 'less safe' to be approved (processes which tend to be put in place for a reason to reduce risk and save the cost of personal injury claims etc)?
I think there is plenty of scope to make things more efficient on the railway; from my point of view I would suggest that:
- Too much weight is put by some parts of the industry on the opinion of people who are not qualified to make safety management decisions in matters of safety, leading to processes which aren't as efficient as they could be because someone's claimed that it isn't safe and everyone has gone with that without proper assessment.
- Embedding safety at a high level saves money overall through a reduced cost in claims, reactive changes to procedures and processes, additional staffing as a control measure, incident investigations etc.
- Rather than looking at the concept of safety as a thing to cut, find 'things' in the industry which you think are inefficient and say, how can I make this better? Then work safety into that revised process.
- Where changes are introduced, unions and rail companies need to work with each other not against each other. Silly demands like three guards per train or threats to make all conductors redundant are unhelpful. 'X' is what we want to achieve, what can each side do to make this a reality?
